Winston Smith
Character Analysis

The protagonist of the novel, a 39-year-old Outer Party functionary who privately rebels against the Party's totalitarian rule. Frail, intellectual, and fatalistic, Winston works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth rewriting news articles to conform with the Party's current version of history. Winston perceives that the Party's ultimate goal is to gain absolute mastery over the citizens of Oceania by controlling access to the past and—more diabolically—controlling the minds of its subjects. Orwell uses Winston's habit of introspection and self-analysis to explore the opposition between external and internal reality, and between individualism and collective identity. Convinced that he cannot escape punishment for his disloyalty, Winston nonetheless seeks to understand the motives behind the Party's oppressive policies, and takes considerable personal risks not only to experience forbidden feelings and relationships but to contact others who share his skepticism and desire to rebel against Ingsoc (English Socialism).

Winston Smith Quotes in 1984

The 1984 quotes below are all either spoken by Winston Smith or refer to Winston Smith. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

).
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Signet Classics edition of 1984 published in 1961.

Book 1, Chapter 3
Quotes

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word "doublethink" involved the use of doublethink.

The process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every predication made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.

He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again.

If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal; you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out.

"Sometimes," she said, "they threaten you with something—something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, ‘Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself." "All you care about is yourself," he echoed. "And after that, you don't feel the same towards the other person any longer." — "No," he said, "you don't feel the same."

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Winston Smith Character Timeline in 1984

The timeline below shows where the character Winston Smith appears in 1984. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Book 1, Chapter 1

As the clocks strike thirteen on a day in April, Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of the Outer Party, climbs the stairs to his flat in...
(full context)

...the electricity that powers the elevator has been turned off in preparation for Hate Week, Winston, who is 39 years old, frail, fair-haired and wearing a blue Party uniform, slowly climbs...
(full context)

As he enters the flat, Winston hears a voice reading a list of figures about the production of pig iron. It...
(full context)

Gazing through his window at the rows of rotting and bombed-out buildings, Winston can't remember whether London has always looked this way. He is distracted by the sight...
(full context)

Controlling his facial expression, Winston faces the telescreen. By leaving work early he has missed his opportunity to eat in...
(full context)

Sitting in an alcove out of sight of the telescreen, Winston takes out a penholder and nib, a bottle of ink, and a blank book. Since...
(full context)

Feeling nervous, Winston begins writing in the diary about a film he had seen the previous evening in...
(full context)

...the Two Minutes Hate, O'Brien, a charismatic Inner Party member whose body language suggests to Winston that he secretly hates the Party, had entered the Records Department with an attractive dark-haired...
(full context)

...telescreen broadcasted a story about Emmanuel Goldstein, a former Party leader and now its scapegoat. Winston experienced conflicting feelings of hate toward Goldstein on one hand and the Party on the...
(full context)

...telescreen along with the Party slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Winston's eyes met O'Brien's, and it seemed to Winston that O'Brien was sending him a silent...
(full context)

In the apartment, Winston finds he has been writing "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" repeatedly in the diary. He realizes...
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 2

Carelessly leaving the diary open on the table, Winston opens the door. It is a neighbor, Mrs. Parsons, who wants Winston to help unblock...
(full context)

Back in his flat, Winston remembers a dream he once had in which someone in a dark room said to...
(full context)

Winston wonders why he's keeping the diary, since it's doubtful that it will survive him when,...
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 3

Winston wakes from a dream of his mother, who was vaporized when he was a boy,...
(full context)

...with dark hair comes toward him, taking off her clothes with a careless gesture that Winston admires. He awakens with the word "Shakespeare" on his lips to an ear-splitting whistle from...
(full context)

Struggling through compulsory morning exercises, Winston tries to remember a time when Oceania hasn't been at war, and fails. Instead, he...
(full context)

Winston decides that the Party's ability to change the past by controlling not only the media,...
(full context)

At that moment the telescreen screams at him to pay attention, and Winston realizes that his facial expressions are betraying his loathing of the Party.
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 4

At work, Winston rewrites news articles so that they reflect the Party's current version of history, a task...
(full context)

...demonstrating in the streets in gratitude to Big Brother for having raised the chocolate ration. Winston is appalled that doublethink has made it possible for people to swallow obvious lies: No...
(full context)

As the quacking voice of the man at the next table continues, Winston thinks to himself that Mrs. Parsons will one day be denounced by her children and...
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 6

Winston writes in his diary about an encounter he had with an aging prole prostitute in...
(full context)

...are not allowed to feel or express desire for each other, encounters with prostitutes are Winston's only sexual outlet. Desire, too, is thoughtcrime. Winston confesses in the diary that the prostitute...
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 7

Still writing in his diary, Winston records his belief that the Party will be overthrown by the proles, who make up...
(full context)

From a children's textbook, Winston copies out a passage describing capitalism. He can't tell how much of the passage is...
(full context)

Winston is mystified by the Party's reasons for continuously falsifying the past, and horrified that what...
(full context)

Winston becomes aware that he is writing the diary to O'Brien. Though conscious of his own...
(full context)

Book 1, Chapter 8

Instead of going to the Community Center, Winston wanders through prole neighborhoods. He is fearful because he knows the Party disapproves of ownlife,...
(full context)

Winston passes by a group of proles who are standing outside a pub and arguing about...
(full context)

Winston follows an old man into another pub, intending to ask him about life before the...
(full context)

Next, Winston finds himself outside the junk shop where he had bought the diary. The owner, an...
(full context)

Winston leaves, planning to return in a month's time to buy the print, learn the rest...
(full context)

Convinced that the girl is spying on him, Winston considers smashing her skull with a cobblestone. Full of dread, he hurries home, drinks some...
(full context)

Book 2, Chapter 1

Four days later, at work, as Winston is walking past the dark-haired girl, she suddenly falls. As he is helping her up...
(full context)

Later, Winston sees the girl in the lunchroom but can't bring himself to speak to her. Finally,...
(full context)

...convoy of Eurasian prisoners. As they stand together watching the event, the girl whispers to Winston directions to a location in the countryside outside of London, near a dead tree. As...
(full context)

Book 2, Chapter 2

Winston meets the girl at the agreed-upon place, then follows her to a deserted clearing. They...
(full context)

They walk into the open and Winston recognizes the pasture that he has dreamed of—the Golden Country. A thrush sings in a...
(full context)

Book 2, Chapter 3

Julia and Winston travel back to London separately, by different routes. But before they leave they arrange to...
(full context)

For several weeks Julia and Winston meet at irregular times in the streets of London, but do not return to the...
(full context)

One night they have sex in an abandoned church. While In the church, Julia tells Winston about herself. She is 26, lives in a hostel with 30 other girls, and works...
(full context)

Winston, in turn, tells Julia about a time when he was on a community hike with...
(full context)

Book 2, Chapter 4

After a month, Winston decides to rent the room above Mr. Charrington's junk shop as a place in which...
(full context)

...on the black market. They listen to the prole woman singing a popular song, and Winston realizes he has never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. Julia...
(full context)

Afterward, as they look at the picture of the church on the wall, Winston speaks the first line of the nursery rhyme he learned. Julia, to his surprise, provides...
(full context)

Book 2, Chapter 5

...a heat wave grips the city, the city is consumed by preparations for Hate Week. Winston embellishes articles that are to be quoted in speeches while Julia produces atrocity pamphlets. As...
(full context)